Development News

"The brief was to put some apartments on that corner."

I got hold of of the jocular architect Will Alsop in his London office to ask about the midrise he designed for independent developer and former architect Bianca Pollak, to be built on Strathgowan Avenue, just south of Yonge and Lawrence. I’d asked him what instructions he got from his client that resulted in what, if built, will be the most delightful condo in town.

With the bottom six floors enveloped in a stainless steel mesh, and the top four a tabletop, Alaska, as it would be known, is the sort of building we’re more accustomed to seeing in Berlin, Shanghai, or even Abu Dhabi. But here in Toronto, we tend more towards the rectilinear.

Alsop, who also designed the Sharpe Centre for Design at OCAD, is the bon vivant to Gehry’s mad professor and Nouvel’s fantasist. His designs tend to evince a beauty filtered through a sense of humour.

But he’s also interested in how his buildings work where they sit, and for Alsop, this stretch of Yonge Street, including this corner, which currently houses a nursery, a sporting goods store and the building that Pollak’s design shop now occupies, doesn’t  yet know its worth.

"Apart from Ms. Pollak’s existing building, which is rubbish, what is it about this part of the street that’s wrong and could be better? The answer is there’s quite a lot wrong. It’s the scale: It needs to be brought up to celebrate Yonge Street, one of the most important streets in Canada. It’s tough to do with one site," he says, "but we can make a start."

The appropriate applications for the building, whose address would be on Strathgowan Avenue, are with the city now. Word on when Yonge and Stragowan may get some of Alsop's apartments is expected sometime in the next 18 months.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Will Alsop

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Don River Park, the 7.3 hectre park in the heart of the West Don Lands that will be largely completed this month, is remarkable chiefly for its incorporation of what’s known as a flood protection landmass into its landscape.

It’s the latest example of a city that’s long been in the habit of blending infrastructure and design.

Like the old Hydro houses and the R.C. Harris water treatment plant, Infrastructure Ontario’s armoured mound near the mouth of the Don at River Street, meant to protect the downtown core from the sort of flooding that might result from a century hurricane, is one of the centrepieces of this new park, working water necessities into itself, much like Sherbourne Commons turned its water purification plant into a water feature.

"I think this is a good precedent for how we can design our spaces," says James Roach, Waterfront Toronto’s director of parks, design and construction.

The park has been in development since September 2010. When completed, it will run along the Don River while simultaneously providing "spectacular views of downtown and Lake Ontario," according to the park's website. It will include areas for lacrosse, soccer, bird watching, picnics, concerts, tobogganing, as well as meadows and hiking trails. 

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: James Roach

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One of the city’s biggest demolition jobs is about to get underway to make room for a new 540,000 square foot mixed-use complex at 88 Scott Street near Yonge and Wellington.

What’s there now, at 185,000 square feet, is a 1951 limestone building, to which several additions were made in the early 1980s. What makes the demolition such a major project is that the developer, Concert Properties, has decided to save the limestone and incorporate it into the new building.

"All the stones will be catalogued, cleaned and repaired if necessary," says Concert’s VP of development, Kelly Wilson. He says they’ll probably end up being stored for at least two years before being reused. In addition to greatly reducing the demolition waste (and the new material needed for construction), one of the side effects of the decision will be that, despite the new design, the building will retain some familiarity.

"From a pedestrian perspective, you’re going to read the building pretty much the way it reads today," Wilson says. "Floors two to five will look virtually exactly the way it does today."

"The 1951 building that we are reconstructing is not a designated heritage building," Wilson says. "But it is what we call a character building and a good example of a modern classic architectural style. Nevertheless, it has been a part of the fabric of the community for the last 62 years and although salvaging and reinstating the limestone and granite is very expensive, we believe it is the most contextually appropriate urban design solution for the site and the reuse of the stones fits Concert’s commitment to building sustainable communities."

Wilson expects the demolition to take eight or nine months, with another 42 months for construction of the 58-storey tower, which will also include five underground levels. Eighty-eight Scott will have 479 residential units, as well as 60,000 square feet of office space and 10,000 square feet of retail.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Kelly Wilson

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According to a recent broadly based and carefully methodological study, streetcar tracks are not good for cyclists.

Any urban cyclist would have been able to tell you that. They get especially bad in snowy weather, when the sides of streets, the bits usually hived off for cyclists, are piled high with snow moved out of the way of motorists. That’s when people on bikes are pushed closer to the grooves that are perfectly sized for bike tires to slip into them, flipping cyclists off and, possibly, into traffic. When you get to an intersection like Dundas and Bathurst where two streetcar lines cross, trying to keep at right angles to the tracks, the safest way for a cyclist to approach them, can start to look like quadrinomial equation.

But now, there is more than anecdotal evidence. The study, conducted in Toronto and Vancouver, asked 690 cyclists in downtown emergency rooms where they had their accidents and studied the conditions of those sites, comparing them to other randomly selected locations along that same cyclist’s route in what is called a case crossover-designed study meant to factor out variables.

"The relative risk is about 3.18 at intersections," says Anne Harris, assistant professor at Ryerson and the lead author of the paper that deals with these aspects of the study. "That’s approximately three times the risk of injury when streetcar tracks are present. It’s four times when not at intersections."

She called it "one of our stronger risk relationships," the strongest of which was the absence of physically separate bike lanes, which is 10 times riskier than the painted lines we have in Toronto, which the study found offer no significant protection.

The report was published in Injury Prevention and funded by the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Anne Harris

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Some might have expected the man to get a highway at least, given the high Jack Layton went out on, but according to Councillor Paula Fletcher, whose ward was part of Layton’s riding, Jack Layton Way is far more appropriate.

In addition to being an avid cyclist (and not an especially outspoken advocate for highways), "He was a very big community person," Fletcher says. "He always had time for difficult little community problems and he was very much connected to his neighbourhood. Even when he was occupied with big national issues, I could always call him up and he’d always have time for me and the area."

The naming ceremony on Sunday, which took place on the 400-metre-long road near the old Don Jail and the new Bridgepoint Hospital, included a lion dance, acknowledging the Chinatown that was so big a part of Layton’s professional and personal life.

Jack Layton Way will not be the only thing named for the late politician, who died of cancer in 2011. "This is our community’s tribute to Jack Layton," Fletcher says. "This is the community where he was elected as a metro councillor, a city councilllor and an MP. There is the ferry terminal named for him, which the City of Toronto named after him. The mayor, councillor O’Connell and Olivia Chow spent a lot of time looking [for] something that was a large piece of city infrastructure that would be appropriate."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Paula Fletcher
Photos: Paula Fletcher

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The idea of city-building was greatly expanded under the auspices of a reading at Harbourfront last week.

Unlike most such events, which tend to have one or more authors standing at a podium, authors Ed Keenan and Ivor Tossell decided to act as facilitators to a group of four people they decided were the city-builders Torontonians should be hearing from. Both have Toronto books out this season.

The four speakers, billed as Toronto Talks: The Future of our City, were introduced by both authors, tag-tea style, with Keenan, a former Yonge Street Media editor, relaying a lesson he learned growing up in an active, impecunious and sometimes chaotic household. "If you want something to happen," he said, "you have to make it happen."

David Buchbinder, a member of the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band and founder of Diasporic Genius, talked about art and storytelling. Toronto Sport and Social Club co-founder Kristi Herold discussed the role--and further potential--of sports in the city. Boris Chan, an engineer at Xtreme Labs, spoke provocatively about the difference between democracy and what Xtreme calls "do-ocracy."

The evening was rounded out with Mike Labbé of Options for Homes, who outlined his organization’s novel approach to recycled urban wealth. "What we’ve found is that 70 per cent of the wealth in our city is created by real estate or real estate development," Labbé said. "How do we make that wealth do the best possible work for our society?"

Writer: Bert Archer

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There’s no solution to the absence of family-sized condos in the city yet, but it is on the radar.

The city’s conducting a series of public consultations on every aspect of condominium living, and according to Peter Moore, the city planning division project manager in charge of the project, the subject of raising families in condos came up last week's initial meeting held in the downtown core.

"We raise this issue with developers," he says. "They say you can’t sell these big units because they’re too expensive. I know there was a direction to require developers to provide larger units, but I don’t think the direction was finalized as a zoning requirement or a official plan policy."

Peter Langdon, citing manager of the community policy sector of the planning division, confirms in a report to City Council’s Planning and Growth Management Committee that the recommendation is working its way through the system. He also added that Councillor Adam Vaughan has already insisted knock-out panels be installed in towers in Ward 20, which includes City Place, reasoning that though buying multiple units may be prohibitively expensive now, in 20 years or so, the relative expense may be more manageable.

People at the first consultation brought up the notion of adaptable of flexible units, condos that start out with the usual complement of studios and one-bedroom units, that can evolve over time through concatenation into large units suitable for families without millions to spend on the current versions of large suites.

"I’m pretty sure not many buildings are amenable to that at this time," Moore says, "but I’m pretty sure that will be an issue going forward."

The other family-related subject that came up at the first meeting was the possibility that, instead of each tower having its own fief-like amenities, developers band together in neighbourhoods and contribute to community centres such as other, non-condo neighbourhoods across the city.

The next public meeting will be held at Scarborough Civic Centre tonight from 7-9 p.m. There will be another meeting tomorrow at the same time at All Saints Kingsway Anglican Church, and on Feb 27 in North York at Congregation Darchei Noam, at Allen and Sheppard.

Writer: Bert Archer
Sources: Peter Moore, Peter Langdon

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The final staff report is in and it looks like there will be a new SmartCentre in Leaside.

Known locally as 70 Wicksteed, the development is proposed for a 1.4-hectare site near the corner of Laird and Eglinton, near the site of another proposed 3.8-hectare business park at Eglinton and Leslie. There has been a great deal of public opposition to the allowance for an anchor store, especially against the Walmart rumored to be a key potential tenant, opposition shared by the ward’s councillor John Parker.

In a letter he wrote to two community groups (including the Leaside Property Owners' Asociation) after a meeting on the subject in late January, Parker wrote, "I share the concerns of the community. None of us wants more retail development in Leaside. None of us wants a Walmart.”

He goes on to say that he further regrets the city cannot stop Walmart from occupying that anchor position, acknowledging that there’s been no confirmation from anyone involved that Walmart is or is being considered as a tenant. Earlier media reports suggested SmartCentre, the developer of "unenclosed shopping centres" behind the report, would not rule out the possibility of a Walmart at the Wicksteed location. 

The report will be considered by the North York Community Council on Feb. 26, and then, if passed, by City Council before the zoning amendments that would allow the development are made.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: John Parker

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From Jane to Kennedy, Eglinton is going to be a different sort of avenue in the next decade, and the city and Metrolinx are inviting residents to be a part of its development.

Starting with a meeting last night at Keele and Eglinton, and continuing on Feb. 26 at the Noor Cultural Centre on Wynford at Eglinton, and on the 28th at Forest Hill Collegiate Institute near the site of a future transit stop at Chaplin, the city’s planning division and Metrolinx will be educating and collecting suggestions and criticism on what will become of one of the city’s biggest avenues.

"What we’re discussing is an overall public realm plan for the whole corridor," says Lorna Day, the city’s project manager for Eglinton Connects. "We’re also looking at ways to green the corridor, to provide better connections to the parks and ravines system, and whether there are opportunities to plant bigger trees."

Like many of the city’s avenues, Eglinton is grossly under-developed, but according to the city’s Avenue and Midrise guidelines, there will likely be a profusion of four-to-eight-storey buildings cropping up along the avenue section of Eglinton (its entire stretch with the exception of the Leaside segment between Mt. Pleasant and Laird) alongside the transit development.

This is the third round of discussions on Eglinton, and there will be two more before Eglinton Connects submits its final report in the spring of 2014.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Lorna Day

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This is the year Toronto makes green living a little more palatable.

The seventh edition of the Green Living Show was announced last week, along with its newest feature, the Ontario Culinary Adventure, done in conjunction with the Ontario Culinary Tourism Alliance.

"This is a collection of a dozen pavilions," says Green Living events VP Robert Orlovski. "Each pavilion represents a chef, a farmer a distiller, vintner or brewer and a destination marketing representative from a region, from Ottawa across the price to Windsor."

In addition to that, there’ll be an eco-parent show-within-a-show (there will, apparently, be mompreneurs), as well as Go Electric, a showcase for electric cars.

"We have been monitoring the marketplace and speaking a lot with car manufacturers," Orlovski says, and "this year, 2013, is a huge year for electric cars. We’ll be featuring tons of electric cars. Not only them, but also charging technologies. A whole section on what the electrification of transportation means in our city."

The Green Living Show, a showcase for marketing and branding firm Green Living whose clients include Loblaws, Samsung, Scotiabank and Tridel as well as the City of Toronto, will be held April 12-14 at the Direct Energy Centre’s halls B and C at the Ex. The  $16 admission can be waived with a drop-off of recyclable electronics at the door.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Robert Orlovski

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There’s a renaissance of sorts going on at Pearson airport.

It has nothing to do with the American-style security, unfortunately, and a reasonable way of getting there is still several years away, but there are 13 new restaurants opening up, and that’s something.

What’s more, unlike the current crop of food outlets, the sort that give airport food a bad name (ugly, bad food, high prices, poor service), the new ones designed by New York firm Icrave won’t be ugly.

Also, there are iPads.

The first of these, Heirloom, a bakery-based restaurant, has just opened in the international departures section of Terminal 1. There will be 12 more, opening in both terminals, in space once given to departure gate seating. None of the old outlets is closing, yet.

"Typically now, if you want to go to the airport, go through your hour and a half security, and you have a choice: you can go to a restaurant, go to a newsstand, go pick up a $10 yogurt or whatever and go to your gate and wait for your flight," says Icrave principal Siobhan Barry.

But with Icrave’s modern design, not only will there be more places to eat and drink, the way passengers spend their time waiting for their flights will also be changed, adhering instead to the customs of the contemporary passenger. 

"The actual gatehold seating is where the biggest change is," Barry says. "It’s now a seat with a table, with an outlet to charge your devices, and an iPad for your use."

Each seat by the newly equipped departure gates will have a leashed iPad, which you can use to browse, but also to order meals from any of the nearby food outlets. To sign in, you’ll enter your flight number, and it will let you know if you have time to eat or drink before you have to board your flight. It will cut off ordering 15 minutes before boarding.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Siobhan Barry

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The taxi industry says we’ve got too many cabs on the streets for a driver to make a decent living. The city says we need between 300 and 600 more to serve the growth in population since the last licenses were issued in 2003.

So which is it?

The Taxi Cab Industry Review, a division of the city’s Municipal Standards and Licensing department, has been trying to figure it out since September 2011. Now, they’ve got a questionnaire up to find out what both drivers and passengers think.

“It is asking taxi cab riders in the city of Toronto to let us know more about how they use taxicabs,” says Vanessa Fletcher, project manager for the review, who says there are currently about 5,000 licensed taxis in the city. “Where do you use them and why? How long do you wait for them? And how long do you think you should wait?”

So far, Fletcher’s department has hired a consultant, Taxi Research Partners led by Dr. James Cooper (at a consulting fee of $68,332), and have gone out themselves to taxi ranks around the city to time how long cabs were waiting for fares. The average, they found, was 39 minutes.

The city has no statistics on driver income, but according to a very limited survey conducted by Open File around the same time, drivers figure they can make between $600 and $1,000 profit a week, with the higher end requiring 12-hour days, seven days a week.

The city's taxi survey will wrap up at the end of the month, and Fletcher expects the final report to be in to the city by the end June.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Vanessa Fletcher

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It's been almost 15 years since Toronto's amalgamation. Now, after 135 meetings on finally amalgamating the zoning bylaws for the city’s 43 planning divisions covering the 478,000 properties in its six former municipalities, the planners are taking it to the people.

There will be an open house at the Metro Hall Rotunda today between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., and the unified bylaws (which are viewable in a searchable format here) will be discussed at an open meeting for the Planning and Growth Management Committee on Feb. 13.

"The plan here was to create a single new bylaw for the city," says acting director of planning Joe D’Abramo. "We weren’t really going to start from scratch. It’s not about changing the standard, it was more about a consolidation.... Whenever you do that, there’s always going to be a bit of change, but we’re keeping height and density the same."

D’Abramo says that some of the bylaws go back 60 years, and that there are currently 1,600 pages of amendments made to bylaws that were originally enacted to cover municipalities that haven’t existed in decades, such as Swansea and Leaside (both amalgamated in 1967).

The changes being made at this stage will be of interest mostly to developers and others in the building trades, but this is the first phase of a process that will ultimately include more significant changes to the zoning laws.

"The message I’ve been trying to give to groups that have asked for attention to revising standards is that that’s part of phase two," D’Abramo says, "and we haven’t set a priority for them. They’ll likely occur on an area by area basis. When you’re dealing with zoning, it’s really detailed, so you’re likely making those changed at an area-specific level."

Asked about the timing of the process, D’Abramo says, "Of course in a perfect world, you would have wanted to set out your rules and regulations before the boom, but it didn’t work that way, and when you’re in the midst of it, it’s even harder because the people don’t want it changed, because they’re trying to work with the rules."

D’Abramo expects the new bylaws, including 300 pages of text and thousands of pages of maps, to go to council in time for their April 3-4 session. "There might be one more council delay," he says, "only because generally after council debates anything this big, the changes can’t be made instantly at the same meeting, so they may have to come back in May."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Joe D’Abramo

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UPDATE: According to City Hall: The open house will now be held on Wednesday, February 27 from 4 to 8 p.m. in the rotunda at Metro Hall, 55 John St. The statutory public meeting will be held Wednesday, March 6 at 9:30 a.m. in the Council Chamber at City Hall, 100 Queen St. W.

Jennifer Keesmaat thinks we’re congested in pretty much every way we can be. The city’s new chief planner figures we don’t have enough room to drive, seats on transit, room to cycle, or even proper ways to get around on foot.

She thinks it’s high time we talk about it, and she’s behind a series of public discussions on the subject of what she broadly refers to as moving around in the city.

"We’ve never had a big conversation about this in over a decade of being an amalgamated city," Keesmaat says.

Though the first phase of these talks and analysis are being conducted in conjunction with Metrolinx, which is considering transportation across the region, parts two and three are going to be about identifying Toronto’s own priorities and deciding how to pay for them.

"We’ll be talking about how far behind we are," she says, "because we’re really far behind as a city. We’re really under-investing, and it’s really important for people to know that."

She's optimistic that talking about what might be done to improve traffic congestion, transit overload, bike lanes and pedestrian infrastructure might not only be mutually educational, but could lower some of the traditional tensions surrounding these issues.

"I'm hoping that the way this process is different is that we're providing good information, and I hope we've reached a moment that we can recognize the magnitude of the problem that we have and we can maybe set aside some of our more parochial considerations and take a larger, city-building view of this," she says. "In an ideal scenario, there’ll be something for everyone and the worst case scenario is that there's a risk that nothing happens, and that people stay hunkered down in their camps. My hope is that by stimulating this public discourse, we’ll begin to move beyond the positions that people have held in the past and that have led us to stalemate."

Things seem to be off to a good start. Keesmaat says that in the first two days of the initiative, about 1,600 people responded to what she calls the "really funky" online tool.

The first meetings ere Monday, the second set is this afternoon at 4 p.m. and this evening at 6:30 p.m. in the rotunda of the Scarborough Civic Centre, followed by two more at the same times at the North York Civic Centre on Feb. 11 and City Hall on the 13th.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jennifer Keesmaat

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Eight years and three developers later, the mid-rise that’s been haunting the corner of Queen and Pape, first as a hole, then as a shell, is finally entering the home stretch.

“We’ve registered with Tarion and are waiting on Tarion approval,” says Norma Walton, president of the Rose and Thistle Group, who bought the site and its partially built residential mid-rise last summer. “Then we’ll move in with our crew and go full-speed ahead.”

Walton expects to have everything she needs by the end of February.

It’s an odd situation. The extreme delays, caused partially by the recessions and partially, according to Walton, by two first-time developer partners who had a falling out, mean that the original sales agreements for the condos have all lapsed. Rose and Thistle are in the unusual position of finishing an unsold building.

But Walton doesn’t seem worried.

“It’s such a great location,” she says of the central Leslieville site. “Our view is, we’ll get them finished to the point where we have kitchens and hardwood floors for the purchasers to choose from, and once we have the units to the point where they can be walked, we’ll probably put them on MLS with our agents.”

The nine units on four storeys range from 550 square feet to about 1,000, with two ground-floor retail spaces at 800 and 900 square feet (along with 8 parking spaces).

Though relatively unknown in the residential sector, Rose and Thistle own between 45 and 50 commercial properties, including the old Corus space at 32 Atlantic in Liberty Village, which they renovated and now rent to ad firm Cossette.

But this isn’t their first foray into homes, either. They’ve done townhouses in Scarborough and, according to Walton, some condo conversions in Yorkville.

Though prices haven’t been set yet, Walton says “The neighbourhood seems to be supporting $550 a square foot up to $650, so it’ll probably bee in that range.”

She expects to finish the building in the next 18 months.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Norma Walton

Do you know of a new building going up, a business expanding or being renovated, a park in the works or even a new house being built in the neighbourhood? Please send your development news tips to [email protected].